Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year

The first biography of The New Yorker's influential, powerful, and controversial film critic.

A decade after her death, Pauline Kael remains the most important figure in film criticism today, in part due to her own inimitable style and power within the film community and in part due to the enormous influence she has exerted over an entire subsequent generation of film critics. During her tenure at the New Yorker from 1967 to 1991 she was a tastemaker, a career maker, and a career breaker. Her brash, vernacular writing style often made for an odd fit at the stately New Yorker .

Brian Kellow gives us a richly detailed look at one of the most astonishing bursts of creativity in film history and a rounded portrait of this remarkable (and often relentlessly driven) woman. Pauline Kael is a book that will be welcomed by the same audience that made Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls bestsellers, and by anyone who is curious about the power of criticism in the arts.

Brian Kellow is the features editor of Opera News , where his column, "On the Beat," appears monthly. He is the author of The Bennetts: An Acting Family and the coauthor of Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell . A classically trained pianist, Kellow has also written for Opera and Playbill , among others. He lives in New York City.